Pinboard (guardiantech)

Mozilla to sell ultra-low-cost smartphones in India soon >> Total Telecom

guardiantech — 2014-06-11T11:44:02+00:00

Mozilla plans to bring what it describes as ultra-low-cost smartphones to India in the near future. The operating system provider on Tuesday said it has partnered with Indian device makers Intex and Spice to enable it to launch the first Firefox OS devices in the country "in the next few months". A statement from the company suggests the phones will be based on the chipset solution Mozilla has developed with Spreadtrum. In February the two companies announced they were working together to create a chipset that would power smartphones costing less than $25. That ultra-low-cost solution is now available, Mozilla said.

The right market to go for (India is giant, Nokia is fading, and people want something new) but will it be in time to compete with Android/AOSP phones from local and foreign names?

To Serve Users >> Hacking for Christ

guardiantech — 2014-05-15T18:54:50+00:00

Gervase Markham of Mozilla on the DRM-in-Firefox row:

we think our stance has worked rather well; over the years, the Mozilla project has been a force for good on the web that other organizations, for whatever reason, have not managed to be. But we aren’t invincible – we don’t win every time. We didn’t win on H.264, although the deal with Cisco to drive the cost of support to $0 everywhere at least allowed us to live to fight another day. And we haven’t, yet, managed to find a way to win on DRM. The question is: is software DRM on the desktop the issue we should die on a hill over? We don’t think so. Bradley accuses us of selling out on our principles regarding preserving the open web. But making a DRM-free web is not within our power at the moment. Our choice is not between “DRM on the web” and “no DRM on the web”, it’s between “allow users to watch DRMed videos” and “prevent users from watching DRMed videos”. And we think the latter is a long-term losing strategy, not just for the fight on DRM (if Firefox didn’t exist, would our chances of a DRM-free web be greater?), but for all the other things Mozilla is working for.

Reasoned debate in the comments too.

Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME >> Mozilla Hacks blog

guardiantech — 2014-05-14T21:17:53+00:00

Andreas Gal:

Instead of DRM schemes that limit how users can access content they purchased across devices we have long advocated for more modern approaches to managing content distribution such as watermarking. Watermarking works by tagging the media stream with the user’s identity. This discourages copyright infringement without interfering with lawful sharing of content, for example between different devices of the same user. Mozilla would have preferred to see the content industry move away from locking content to a specific device (so called node-locking), and worked to provide alternatives. Instead, this approach has now been enshrined in the W3C EME specification.

Firefox and Flux: a new, beautiful browser is coming >> DO NOT LICK

guardiantech — 2014-04-29T20:43:24+00:00

This new Firefox, Firefox 29, was borne out of a series of incredible, detail-obsessed designers and engineers understanding that taking products from good to great requires more than a series of incremental improvements. Good can be achieved through incrementalism. Great requires, at times, overhaul. Firefox 29 contains extensive improvements that were planned back when Alex Faaborg, Madhava Enros, and myself were the only designers at Mozilla. Back then, Firefox was beginning to buckle under the weight of its inconsistent code and interface. It’s common enough for large codebases maintained across years to develop inconsistencies. But, Firefox’s nature as an open-source community project contributed to idiosyncratic user experiences. Menus and dialogs used different tenses and tones. Add-ons behaved unpredictably. Customisation was handled differently throughout the browser. Over the past few years, we’ve been working to improve many instances of inconsistent behaviour, such as replacing modal dialogs for tab-modal ones, standardising notifications, and using a uniform tone-of-voice. Making improvements here and there is often what user experience designers at an organisation are expected to do: fix what’s broken, slightly improve what isn’t, and generally don’t get in the way of engineering effort. But, this method can only make an existing product slightly better, and the gaps it causes reveal themselves in time. A sinking ship can’t be patched endlessly when it needs a new hull. This is when user experience design is most effective: when it envisions the system as a whole. When it steps away from the trees and sees the forest holistically. Firefox needed a new hull, and the bulk of that hull is arriving on Tuesday.

Brendan Eich steps down as Mozilla CEO >> The Mozilla Blog

guardiantech — 2014-04-03T21:43:25+00:00

Mitchell Baker:

Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.
We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.
Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.

Mozilla and Samsung collaborate on next generation web browser engine >> The Mozilla Blog

guardiantech — 2013-04-08T20:30:07+00:00

Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That’s why we’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.
Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way.

This happened while all the Google/Apple/WebKit forking was happening. Samsung and Mozilla is an intriguing combination: why would each want to work with the other?

Telefónica fears over Windows Phone >> WSJ

guardiantech — 2012-12-04T21:45:55+00:00

Ben Rooney:

Matthew Key, who heads Telefónica Digital, which has been the only one of the giant Spanish telco’s four main divisions not to be based in Madrid, expressed doubts over Windows Phone.
“I think the [Windows Phone] software is interesting,” he said. “The devices are coming. Whether it is going to be market moving, the jury is out. Do we see it will help us rapidly drive adoption in Latin America? No. Do we see Mozilla stuff we are doing? Yes.
“We are over-reliant on [two manufacturers] iOS with Apple and Android with Samsung. For us to have a third OS is an important de-risker from a strategic perspective.”

The "third OS" isn't BlackBerry or Windows Phone; it's Mozilla's Firefox OS.

Firefox killing 64-bit version on Windows >> Firefox Google Groups

guardiantech — 2012-11-24T23:42:51+00:00

* Amazingly, there is still the perception by some Windows Nightly users that the 64-bit MSVC builds are faster than their 32-bit counterparts [8], whereas even before the recent regressions that was not the case [5] [6].
* Users of 64-bit versions of Windows may be under the impression that 64-bit builds of Nightly are somehow "more correct" for their platform, especially since http://nightly.mozilla.org displays 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Nightly builds with equal prominence and no indication that the 64-bit builds are experimental/effectively untested.
* Whilst there was a thorough discussion of the Win64 pros/cons [9], a follow-up summary of facts [10], and internally most of us know that Win64 builds aren't something that we'll be focusing on near-term - there doesn't appear to have been any public newsgroup/blog postings communicating the final decision. So it's not surprising that the average Nightly user is not aware that Win64 builds are pretty much unsuited for public consumption.

Upshot: Mozilla is killing 64-bit Firefox on Windows. But the people who've been using it in nightly builds are horrified and outraged.

Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation >> Mitchell's Blog

guardiantech — 2012-07-09T11:05:46+00:00

Much of Mozilla’s leadership — including that of the Thunderbird team — has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts.

Translation: Thunderbird is now officially a zombie.

In Russia, Yandex gets ousted as default search option in Firefox >> The Next Web

guardiantech — 2012-06-10T20:48:18+00:00

The commercial agreement between Mozilla and Yandex is notably set to expire on the 31st of December 2012, which begs the question: why was Yandex ousted in favor of Google in the most recent Russian-language Firefox browser build way before that date?
For the record, Mozilla wasn’t contractually bound to keep Yandex as the default search option in the Russian Firefox build – but still, why the change?

The Firefox change was done as a bugfix. Neat.

Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox | The Mozilla Blog

guardiantech — 2011-12-23T00:02:13+00:00

"'We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.' “'Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,' said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla." The report by Kara Swisher suggests Google will pay $300m per year to Mozilla. That's a big increase on the last contract. And Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft to it. There's still life and rivalry in web search

Mozilla relies on search deals for 98% of revenues >> Computerworld

guardiantech — 2011-10-12T05:47:12+00:00

"Mozilla today said that income from its search partners, including rival browser maker Google, increased by 19% last year. "Royalties, almost all of which come from search services like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, were $121.1m, up 19.3% from 2009's $101.5m. "The vast bulk of the Mozilla Foundation's revenues came from search providers, which paid the organization for leading Firefox users to their websites. In 2010, royalty payments accounted for 98% of the year's revenues, a percentage point higher than the share of Mozilla's income attributed to search in the two years before." Contract with Google runs out in November. What are the chances of a tough renegotiation? Or will Steve Ballmer turn on the charm and get Bing adopted?